Strip-tower alla Serpentine

Anche quest'anno la Serpentine presenta una nuova scultura di grandi dimensioni nei Royal Parks,  si tratta di un'opera dell'artista tedesco Gerhard Richter (nato nel 1932, Dresda, Germania; vive e lavora a Colonia, Germania). Situata sul piedistallo della Serpentine South, nei Kensington Gardens, STRIP-TOWER (2023) sarà esposta dal 25 aprile al 27 ottobre 2024. 

STRIP-TOWER (2023) amplia la continua esplorazione dell'artista della pittura, della fotografia, della riproduzione digitale, dell'astrazione e dell'approccio auto-scrutatore che hanno occupato la sua pratica per oltre sessant'anni.

Da quando è stata lanciata nel 1970, Serpentine è stata impegnata a lungo nel portare l'arte fuori dal tradizionale contesto delle gallerie e nel paesaggio circostante, offrendo agli artisti l'opportunità di interagire con l'ambiente immediato di Kensington Gardens.

Specifiche commissioni Serpentine di opere d'arte pubbliche hanno spaziato da un'installazione permanente di un cerchio di pietre e panchine di Ian Hamilton Finley per la mostra Inside Out del 1996. Negli ultimi anni, l’arte pubblica è emersa come un filone centrale del programma di Serpentine. Le presentazioni più importanti includono Turning the World Upside Down (2010) di Anish Kapoor, con quattro opere, tra cui i suoi iconici Sky Mirrors, collocati in luoghi in tutto il parco, la scultura finale di Fischli/Weiss Rock on Top of Another Rock (2013), la Fontana di Betrand Lavier ( 2014): e Relatum – Stage di Lee Ufan (2018-19). Nel 2018, la monumentale London Mastaba di Christo e Jeanne-Claude è stata installata nel Serpentine Lake e ha segnato la loro prima grande opera d'arte pubblica nel Regno Unito e l'ultima opera d'arte all'aperto completata durante la vita di Christo. Il progetto di realtà aumentata The Deep Listener (2019) di Jakob Kudsk Steensen, la commissione Taraxos (2021) di Sofia Al Maria e Pollinator Pathmaker (2022 - in corso) di Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg hanno portato nel parco una generazione più giovane di commissioni di artisti.

Immagini: STRIP-TOWER (2023) di Gerhard Richter © 2024, Gerhard Richter, Prudence Cuming Associates

L’altruista e l’opportunista … G.Richter e J.Koons

Ecco due modi diversi di sostenere situazioni sociali, uno che vende i suoi quadri per sostenere urgenze sociali, l’altro che vuole piazzare una sua opera a spese della collettività (solo le spese di installazione ma sono migliaia di euro) per rimanere in duratura visibilità pubblica, voi che ne pensate?

Trovo che questi modi rivelano molto della qualità dell’artista e direttamente anche del suo lavoro.

Il primo infatti ha un lungo e costante percorso creativo, fatto di ricerca e novità, l’altro da decenni produce manufatti luccicanti, ma come sempre sarà la storia a selezionare.

Proposte londinesi nei giorni di Frieze

Eccovi una rapida carrellata sulle diverse proposte delle più note gallerie londinesi nei giorni di Frieze. Iniziamo da Hauser & Wirth con due grandi artisti Paul Mc Carthy e Pierre Huyghe.

Paul McCarthy

Pierre Huyghe

Proseguiamo con Marian Goodman Gallery che apre i suoi nuovi locali londinesi con Gerhard Ricther 

Gerhard Richter 

Fra gli spazi pubblici gli interventi alla Biblioteca Holborn di José Damasceno, proposti da ArtAngel.

José Damasceno

Ho la grande installazione di Glenn Ligon al Camden Arts Centre

Gerhard Richter apre la Goodman di Londra

Oggi saranno i recenti lavori di Gerhard Richter a inaugurare la nuova sede della Galleria Marian Goodman a Londra al 5/8 di Lower John Street.

Marian Goodman is honoured to announce that an exhibition of new and recent works by Gerhard Richter will inaugurate her London gallery. This will be Richter’s first gallery exhibition of this nature in London for nearly two decades. Consisting of over 40 works, with important bodies of new ‘Strip’, ‘Flow’ and ‘Doppelgrau’ paintings, the show will also include a large glass sculpture and a selection of key earlier pieces. 

Over the past five years Richter has been primarily concerned with a series of paintings premised on systematically deconstructing a photograph of his own abstract oil on canvas from 1990. Revisiting an idea he first employed in his late-seventies project ‘128 Photographs of a Painting’, he divided the work’s surface into two vertical sections, then halved those halves, and so on, subjecting them repeatedly to a premeditated procedure he described simply as ‘dividing, mirroring, repeating’. At the point when this digital process had generated 4,096 infinitesimal vertical sections, Richter intervened with a rigorous selection process, re-imposing his subjective will and choosing particular preferred strips with which to continue working. Following one further final halving and mirroring, he had each work printed to his desired scale, so that we might contemplate what have become remarkable horizontal, rhythmic fields of fine lines, oscillating with vibrations of colour, the largest of which stretches over ten metres, as seen on the gallery’s first floor. By tellingly entitling these unique works ‘Strip’ paintings, Richter is referring not to those lines, but both to the miniscule vertical strips they represent of their source and to the sense of physically ‘stripping’ – taking apart and dismantling his original painting. Of not only reinventing, but wholly paring down and fundamentally abstracting his own abstraction. 

On contemplation, Richter’s ‘Strip’ paintings distill the pictorial investigations of a 60-year career into a body of work that is wholly consistent with, and contingent on, everything that has preceded them. As photography once opened new pathways for him in the 1960s, digital technology has now added to the expansive territories of his work. By refuting established categorization, Richter has again been able to exploit one media to deconstruct the possibilities of another, arriving at unchartered and unprecedented new propositions. Although the final incarnation of his ‘Strip’ paintings are empirically pigment printed on paper through a mechanical means, the processes, choices and concerns are entirely those of the artist as they would be in the process of making a traditional painting – and the results are as radical and rewarding. As Robert Storr puts it, ‘There has never been a body of work more “retinal” than Richter’s strip abstractions of the past several years…. these works await the individual viewer in ever shifting yet ever unique spatial and temporal circumstances identical to those in which his works on canvas await us.’

Another new territory through which Richter has reinvestigated his means of abstract painting, whilst undermining preconceptions of what it means for us to encounter them, are his ‘Flow’ paintings, a group of which are presented in one of the ground floor rooms of this exhibition. Their title refers to the gestural currents of enamel paint that have been frozen in motion at the moment Richter fixed a pane of glass directly to the surface of a painting in process on the floor – arresting a once fluid image at a precise chosen instance. His technique of pouring and manipulating paint captures a tension between chance versus the decisive gesture of the artist’s hand. And, while the glass face of each work serves to magnify the materiality of the paint, it also removes the element of direct tactility and undermines how immediacy of touch is typically supposed to facilitate an expressive connection between painter and viewer. Richter leaves us instead with a smooth surface that not only distances us from subjective gesture, but also reflects ourselves and our surroundings. 

If the latter is intrinsic to the experience of his ‘Flow’ paintings, in the four large diptychs Richter has presented in the main ground floor space, reflection has been employed almost entirely in lieu of mark-making in itself, which opens up fundamentally different readings of the monochrome. Each work juxtaposes two different shades of grey paint behind glass, hence their titles, ‘Doppelgrau [Double Grey]’. Sculptural as well as pictorial, each diptych is mounted to a support that projects the picture plane forward off the wall towards the viewer, hovering in space. Their fields of pure grey betray no gesture, so they and the reflections of the architectural space and spectators around them, mean we absorb both tangible spatial division and subtle differentiation of colour simultaneously. This series continues Richter’s nearly 50-year engagement with grey monochromes, an enduring fascination explained by his dictum that ‘Grey is the epitome of non-statement’.

Richter has placed in the middle of this main room a monumental work entitled ‘7 Panes of Glass (House of Cards)’, one of the key new glass pieces Benjamin H. D. Buchloh describes as ‘The culmination of a lifelong preoccupation with the material… [and] an allegorical negation of the long and heroic history of material tropes within the painting and utopian architecture of the twentieth century’. Falling somewhere at the intersection of architecture, picture-making and sculpture, while defying categorization within each, it is constructed from sheets of glass propped against each other at angles that produce the illusion of shards slicing through, layering and dislocating light. If all such Richter glass pieces belong to a lineage from his 1966 ‘Four Glass Panes’, this work in particular also recalls a trip he made to Greenland in 1972, initially inspired by Friedrich but during which Richter soon abandoned that romanticism for a fascination with the formal qualities of icebergs, and took whole volumes of photographs of them. 

In addition to the new works in the show, Richter has punctuated and augmented the exhibition with a selection of paintings on canvas, glass and photographs made over the last 15 years – including his ‘Abstraktes Bild’ and ‘Farben’ paintings – which inform and re-contextualize his more recent pieces. And that sense of continuum is not only appropriate, but vital to this exhibition. To return to Storr, ‘As he has done so many times before, Richter manages to debunk one set of clichés while taking the measure of fresh, as yet “unscripted” possibilities, in particular novel frameworks that qualify or condition the act of looking… What emerges is a desire to claim the whole of an unexplored territory he could see laid out before him from a vantage point to which a previous, intensively pursued practice had lead him.’

Gerhard Richter has recently been the subject of substantial solo exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; The Kunstmuseum Winterthur; and the Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden. The artist’s work was last seen in London in ‘Gerhard Richter: Panorama’, a comprehensive retrospective at Tate Modern in 2011, which travelled to the Neue and Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and The Centre Pompidou, Paris. A fully-illustrated, hardback catalogue with essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Dieter Schwarz, and Robert Storr will accompany his Marian Goodman exhibition.

The new Marian Goodman Gallery London is housed in a former Victorian factory warehouse measuring 11,000 square feet over two floors, which has been completely renovated with the help of David Adjaye. The gallery is located on Soho’s Golden Square and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00am-6:00pm. For further information please call +44 (0)20 7099 0088 or email martin@mariangoodman.com 

The next exhibition in this space will be new work by Danh Vo, opening in January 2015. This will be Vo’s first solo show in London, and will precede his representation of Denmark in the 2015 Venice Biennale.

ArtReview Top 100 2012

Eccola finalmente la grande lista che ogni anno mette in risalto e fa riflettere sul grande sistema dell'arte contemporanea mondiale 

Come sempre, oramai da più di dieci anni, ArtReview la pubblica con tutti i dettagli e commenti sulla sua pubblicazione mensile. 

1. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 

2. Larry Gagosian 

3. Ai Weiwei 

4. Iwan Wirth 

5. David Zwirner 

6. Gerhard Richter 

7. Beatrix Ruf 

8. Nicholas Serota 

9. Glenn D. Lowry 

10. Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones 

11. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani 

12. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood (e-flux) 

13. Cindy Sherman 

14. Alain Seban & Alfred Pacquement 

15. Adam D. Weinberg 

16. Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler & Magnus Renfrew 

17. Marc Glimcher 

18. Marian Goodman 

19. Massimiliano Gioni 

20. Jay Jopling 

21. François Pinault 

22. Klaus Biesenbach 

23. Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp 

24. Barbara Gladstone 

25. RoseLee Goldberg 

26. Eli & Edythe Broad 

27. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 

28. Bernard Arnault 

29. Nicholas Logsdail 

30. Liam Gillick 

31. Ann Philbin 

32. Victor Pinchuk 

33. Maja Hoffmann 

34. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe 

35. Marina Abramović 

36. Dakis Joannou 

37. Udo Kittelmann 

38. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers 

39. Matthew Marks 

40. Gavin Brown 

41. Damien Hirst 

42. Rosemarie Trockel 

43. Wolfgang Tillmans 

44. Agnes Gund 

45. Chus Martínez 

46. Isa Genzken 

47. Iwona Blazwick 

48. Anne Pasternak 

49. Sadie Coles 

50. Daniel Buchholz 

51. Toby Webster 

52. Adam Szymczyk 

53. James Lingwood & Michael Morris 

54. William Wells & Yasser Gerab 

55. Michael Ringier 

56. Theaster Gates 

57. Pussy Riot 

58. Jeff Koons 

59. Steve McQueen 

60. Takashi Murakami 

61. Boris Groys 

62. Emmanuel Perrotin 

63. Richard Chang 

64. Tim Neuger & Burkhard Riemschneider 

65. Slavoj Zizek 

66. Thaddaeus Ropac 

67. Chang Tsong-zung 

68. Elena Filipovic 

69. Tino Sehgal 

70. Christian Boros & Karen Lohmann 

71. Luisa Strina 

72. Claire Hsu 

73. José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto 

74. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo 

75. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal 

76. Budi Tek 

77. Walid Raad 

78. Cuauhtémoc Medina 

79. Massimo De Carlo 

80. Bernardo Paz 

81. Christine Tohme 

82. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo 

83. John Baldessari 

84. Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi 

85. Dasha Zhukova 

86. Vasif Kortun 

87. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz 

88. Candida Gertler 

89. Gisela Capitain 

90. Carol Greene 

91. Franco Noero & Pierpaolo Falone 

92. Jacques Rancière 

93. Miuccia Prada 

94. Maureen Paley 

95. Don, Mera, Jason & Jennifer Rubell 

96. Paul Chan 

97. Victoria Miro 

98. Adriano Pedrosa 

99. Johann König 

100. Gregor Podnar 

La copertina per l'occasione è stata realizzata da John Baldessar 

Allora che ne pensate? 

Ulteriori dettagli ed informazioni al sito http://www.artreview100.com/

Gerhard Richter - Panorama

la pittura forse ha ancora un suo valore e la mostra di Gerhard Richter fino all'8 Gennaio in corso alla Tate Modern di Londra è un chiaro segnale di azione per un’artista che ha percorso tutte le strade espressive che la superficie di un quadro può permettere.

La grande retrospettiva consente, in ottimo allestimento, un piacevole confronto sull’ampia produzione creativa di questo famoso artista tedesco.

Partito da una figurazione tradizionale giunge attraverso differenti sperimentazioni all’azzeramento della forma privilegiando una scelta cromatica molto contemporanea.

La trasformazione pare, attraverso questa mostra, un giusto percorso per un’artista che ha saputo lasciare sicurezze raggiunte per tentare sperimentazioni sempre nuove e con risultati di ottimo valore.

I suoi slittamenti nell’astrazione, nella riformulazione della figura, nel paesaggio e la recente elaborazione cromatica sono passaggi ben controllati e di pregiata qualità espressiva.

Delicati attimi di vita quotidiana si intrecciano con elaborate fascinazioni cromatiche, pastose nubi di colore ricordano paesaggi rarefatti, tassellature cromatiche rimandano a minute pennellate.

Gerhard Richter, The Chicago Art Institute Collection